Straws like bullets / in his back pocket / cold water / in his hand / like a grenade—
Plastic cups of water in his hands / cold / like hand grenades—
For a thousand rupiahs
you can get
a fully grown man
to run around traffic
of heavy steel
like a child
playing tags
short straws
packed like bullets
in his back pocket
plastic cups of water
Cold
in both hands
like hand grenades
he hands over to you
reaching out[cross that]
across the heated air
above the dull knife edge
of your passenger seat's window—
of the window
you roll down
from the safety
of your passenger seat—
of your modded
passenger seat—
a hand like an elephant's trunk
resting on
the edge of a car's tinted window
like a shark fin
rolled down just enough
to let
the hand roll out—
it roll out—
to flick dead ash
on the asphalt
and rest
on the sun-warmed roof
of the car to wait—
and wait—
for the next drag—
Monday, 5 November 2007
Sunday, 4 November 2007
More honesty you don't need/more of me repeating myself repeating myself myself myself
«And one night I woke up in room A007 and went straight to my desk (so fast I almost went at it), opened a notebook my mom had left me on her last visit when she threw a full good box of Honey Crunch cereal down the sink, one of the many drug companies' gifts she always had lying around the house—it seems sometimes all the stationeries I've ever used in my life had the cute Paphros owl on them—and spent the next two hours writing a Platonic dialogue between M & M, both initials for my own name of course, just like this one in fact, with the two Ms instead of the « », and I think I was really honest then. I've still got the notebook, I plan to type it out one day, that's how honest I think it was.»
«Why, how, what makes you think it was honest? What makes you keep the notebook for so long? I mean, it does feel good when you've written something honest, doesn't it, even when the writing is bad, you read it years later and you can still feel the warmth, but that's making the whole thing sound cheap, or just not ... singular. You do feel warm inside when you've written something as honestly and as truthfully as you can. even when you don't get everything down, because maybe you're not good enough, some warmth does stay on the page.»
«Well, that's right. Sometimes I think honesty is a technique, you know, Hemingway always talked about it, although he used the word «truthfully» instead—I don't think he ever wrote «honestly», for obvious reasons, not to write anything «ghastly» like Orwell said could've been one, maybe not, Hem would never have listened to Georgie O.—but it's such and integral part of the early career of a writer ... well, really, of his life before he started his career as a writer—I think when you aspire to be a writer you start out just wanting to be honest—and I don't think you can start up a head of steam unless you're at least a little honest about yourself—that once you've got the career and you get very good at it, at all the different permutations of honesty, at telling it stright, or telling it circuitously to get at a bigger truth, at lying ... you don't wanna go bback, you distrust those feelings now, you think maybe you were just drinking too much coffee to stop yourself from going hungry. «Hunger was good discipline?» Where's the beef? You know, now you think honesty was just that, being really really hungry and not being able to afford a hot lunch.»
«Yes, and what did M & M talk about?»
«Love. Of course. At least it started out as a discussion about love. But then I think it ended up more about me ... than this girl I though I was in love with. I think I actually wrote it down that I loved her. Of course I didn't. OK, I did. I sort of liked the way she could say the things I used to want to say, to other people, to myself. Cruel things. It was the start of my masochism. So I wrote in my honest, uncompromising style du jour about how I had all these masks, a whole trunk of them that I put on according to plan, like, who am I talking to now, if it's her then I'll just put on my Bob Saget mask—that's what I used to call my straight, cool, but sensitive man mask—on and if it's a Thursday afternoon Philosophy tutorial then it's my ESPRIT tweed-patterned jacket and a skeptic mask and off I go on my eco-friendly SPECIALIZED MTB. But she didn't seem to care about all these masks I put on, she didn't even see them. One day I saw her at the mall and she said, «You're fat!»—she didn't seem to notice that I was wearing my thin mask. You see how all this talk about masks makes you cringe? That's what most writers feel about honesty. They feel that about themselves ...»
«Why, how, what makes you think it was honest? What makes you keep the notebook for so long? I mean, it does feel good when you've written something honest, doesn't it, even when the writing is bad, you read it years later and you can still feel the warmth, but that's making the whole thing sound cheap, or just not ... singular. You do feel warm inside when you've written something as honestly and as truthfully as you can. even when you don't get everything down, because maybe you're not good enough, some warmth does stay on the page.»
«Well, that's right. Sometimes I think honesty is a technique, you know, Hemingway always talked about it, although he used the word «truthfully» instead—I don't think he ever wrote «honestly», for obvious reasons, not to write anything «ghastly» like Orwell said could've been one, maybe not, Hem would never have listened to Georgie O.—but it's such and integral part of the early career of a writer ... well, really, of his life before he started his career as a writer—I think when you aspire to be a writer you start out just wanting to be honest—and I don't think you can start up a head of steam unless you're at least a little honest about yourself—that once you've got the career and you get very good at it, at all the different permutations of honesty, at telling it stright, or telling it circuitously to get at a bigger truth, at lying ... you don't wanna go bback, you distrust those feelings now, you think maybe you were just drinking too much coffee to stop yourself from going hungry. «Hunger was good discipline?» Where's the beef? You know, now you think honesty was just that, being really really hungry and not being able to afford a hot lunch.»
«Yes, and what did M & M talk about?»
«Love. Of course. At least it started out as a discussion about love. But then I think it ended up more about me ... than this girl I though I was in love with. I think I actually wrote it down that I loved her. Of course I didn't. OK, I did. I sort of liked the way she could say the things I used to want to say, to other people, to myself. Cruel things. It was the start of my masochism. So I wrote in my honest, uncompromising style du jour about how I had all these masks, a whole trunk of them that I put on according to plan, like, who am I talking to now, if it's her then I'll just put on my Bob Saget mask—that's what I used to call my straight, cool, but sensitive man mask—on and if it's a Thursday afternoon Philosophy tutorial then it's my ESPRIT tweed-patterned jacket and a skeptic mask and off I go on my eco-friendly SPECIALIZED MTB. But she didn't seem to care about all these masks I put on, she didn't even see them. One day I saw her at the mall and she said, «You're fat!»—she didn't seem to notice that I was wearing my thin mask. You see how all this talk about masks makes you cringe? That's what most writers feel about honesty. They feel that about themselves ...»
380, or 380 reasons to not get a fake tan in September
In the morning the sun is blue
Cold it's early summer
No one cares
If the cream sand has waited
The whole of July
Plus a good part of August
Or if it's time
Now
For him to dig
Exit tunnels
For hybernating beach towels.
Cold it's early summer
No one cares
If the cream sand has waited
The whole of July
Plus a good part of August
Or if it's time
Now
For him to dig
Exit tunnels
For hybernating beach towels.
Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau (ok, actually, me) to his girlfriend
Go into a corner
Your vantage point
Lookout
Over our history
And see
If I haven't been nothing
But the total opposite
Of what I've always claimed to be.
Your vantage point
Lookout
Over our history
And see
If I haven't been nothing
But the total opposite
Of what I've always claimed to be.
Congradulations
Only one of us will be married
To a girl who loves you more
Than there are fluffs of pollen
In the glare of September
You!
To a girl who loves you more
Than there are fluffs of pollen
In the glare of September
You!
I wish to be united with my feelings but my thoughts keep getting in the way
Like one day in the cinema
I was watching King Kong
And I kept trying to avoid reading the subtitles
All through the action scenes.
I was watching King Kong
And I kept trying to avoid reading the subtitles
All through the action scenes.
Thursday, 1 November 2007
If there does exist the Big Jakarta Poem, it would contain all the following things:
Bratwursts und Beers
München within
the span of a four-leaf
clover:
The Filter Moment Has
Come.
And people going out at 9.47
pm for donuts sprayed
with cheese in machines
copied illegally somewhere
in Sacramento, Calif., USA
and assembled in a ware-
house in the outskirts
of this city—Town Squares'
din beating the noise the
welders make with the
candy flame of their blow-
torches. Why
is everything so loud here
what happens when you com-
bine THX with Dolby? Maybe
the gallon-drum mestizo will
go off the scales and the
pretty redhead fly on the strangeness
of her hair—you top beet!—
and all that's just about
the noise. Govinda govinda go-
vinda Jaya jaya—We've still
got David Hassellhoff on prime
time. This city is a pan of
boiling water, forget realism
and moving Amygisms
for a while now and let's
build a future harmonium
while the jury's out: Every-
thing threatens to boil off
into steam. Things disappear
the way the world's omphalos
turn from an outie into
something non-descript just
to make things easy let's call
it an outie. Let's
do the long week-end at the
volcano: the merino death
cloud will make easy target
for your Canon Digital Rebel
SLR set to [symbol of thunder] or
for the optimists [symbol of cloud] & enjoy
a culinary feast with views
of terraced rice fields on green
slopes angled at the exact
degree to make the water
run down without ever appear-
ing to move. I think they
call it moving «vertically down-
stream». On boulders like houses
that pimple those green kids
sunbathe penises still recover-
ing from recent circumcisions, bar-
baric, when they happen at 10,
11, you try to get it over &
done with before the fine fur
on the base of your cock
graduate into a full bush.
A dilemma you keep to your-
self since there's only one way
out. Forget Su Tung-p'o &
his walking stick, stop strik-
ing jagged stones with it &
start at somewhere close
to a constant height
above sea-level.
München within
the span of a four-leaf
clover:
The Filter Moment Has
Come.
And people going out at 9.47
pm for donuts sprayed
with cheese in machines
copied illegally somewhere
in Sacramento, Calif., USA
and assembled in a ware-
house in the outskirts
of this city—Town Squares'
din beating the noise the
welders make with the
candy flame of their blow-
torches. Why
is everything so loud here
what happens when you com-
bine THX with Dolby? Maybe
the gallon-drum mestizo will
go off the scales and the
pretty redhead fly on the strangeness
of her hair—you top beet!—
and all that's just about
the noise. Govinda govinda go-
vinda Jaya jaya—We've still
got David Hassellhoff on prime
time. This city is a pan of
boiling water, forget realism
and moving Amygisms
for a while now and let's
build a future harmonium
while the jury's out: Every-
thing threatens to boil off
into steam. Things disappear
the way the world's omphalos
turn from an outie into
something non-descript just
to make things easy let's call
it an outie. Let's
do the long week-end at the
volcano: the merino death
cloud will make easy target
for your Canon Digital Rebel
SLR set to [symbol of thunder] or
for the optimists [symbol of cloud] & enjoy
a culinary feast with views
of terraced rice fields on green
slopes angled at the exact
degree to make the water
run down without ever appear-
ing to move. I think they
call it moving «vertically down-
stream». On boulders like houses
that pimple those green kids
sunbathe penises still recover-
ing from recent circumcisions, bar-
baric, when they happen at 10,
11, you try to get it over &
done with before the fine fur
on the base of your cock
graduate into a full bush.
A dilemma you keep to your-
self since there's only one way
out. Forget Su Tung-p'o &
his walking stick, stop strik-
ing jagged stones with it &
start at somewhere close
to a constant height
above sea-level.
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